Let the Parents Decide

Pinging off Calvinator's post below about school choice, i found this interview with Governor Huckabee by Cybercast News Service (Brent Bozell's news outlet) about his views on education matters. If this issue is important for you, it's worth your time to read the entire interview. There are some tough questions, and you may not agree with everything, but it's a good read. He touches on the constitutionality of a federal Dept. of Education, on school choice & voucher proposals, on prayer in public schools, and similar topics.

Here are some highlights (emphases added)...

Q. On December 12, the Concord Monitor ran a story saying that you had met with the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association and that the union was endorsing you. The report said: "Huckabee became the first Republican yesterday to be endorsed by the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association. In a short press conference, President Rhonda Wesolowski lauded Huckabee's opposition to school vouchers and his commitment to arts and music education." Three days later, on December 15, Catholic Online published an interview with you, and they asked: "Catholics believe that parents are the first teachers of their children and that they should be able to choose how to extend their teaching office from among all of the available alternatives; public schools, charter schools, private and parochial schools and home schools. What is your position on parental choice in education?" You responded to them: "I support parental choice. Parents are much better able to make those decisions for their children than a government bureaucrat." So, which is it? Do you oppose vouchers, which the New Hampshire NEA believes is your position, or do you support school choice that would even allow children to go to Catholic schools, as you told Catholic Online?

A. There is no inconsistency, because what I believe is, first of all, education is a mom and dad decision, not an Uncle Sam position. We ought to empower parents and let them make the best choices for their kids. I'm probably one of the few candidates you have ever seen that has the recommendation of an NEA chapter, but also has the strong national recommendation of home-schoolers. And the reason is because I ultimately do believe it is a mother-and-father decision. The state's purpose is to empower and enable parents to make the decision they believe is right.

But I believe if you are going to have public schools, make them the best they can be. I don't support federally mandating vouchers. If a state wishes to implement a voucher program, they have to decide how it works, and how well it works, and what the criteria would be.What I don't want to do is to have the federal government coming down and telling all 50 states here is how you are going to fund education, here is what vouchers are going to look like. Because in some states, for example mine, it would be very problematic to create a statewide voucher system when most of our schools are rural, they're small, they are miles from another school, the economies of scale simply wouldn't necessarily make it that easy to implement a widespread voucher system. But if local districts wished to do it, if states wish to do it, I think that's fine. It goes back to the basic concept that this is a state's decision.

On home-schools and his record in Arkansas:
When I was governor, I passed some of the friendliest home-school legislation in the country. I was the first governor in the history of America to appoint a home-school parent to state board of education. She served as one of the best members we ever had on the state board. We made it so that parents had more choices. We improved charter schools, and expanded charter schools.

More about the Murphy Commission voucher proposal:
The one area that really did not go well was the idea of implementing vouchers. And, again, there were two reasons. Let me get back to them. One was the opposition we had from Christian school administrators, who were fearful that once you take government money, you take government control. Many of them said they would lose their distinctive nature if they were forced to be under government regulations and government mandates that they frankly didn't want. They did not want that level of interference.

But the second thing that happened, or would potentially happen, was you would have students who if they came to the school without a level that met the full tuition, one of two things: they either then say, look, you are going to have to make up the difference as a private school or we'll sue for discrimination, or, if they win that, then the only people able to go were those who could subsidize the rest of the voucher, and most of the students in my state would have been unable to access it, because there were only a few districts large enough, with the economies of scale, that could have actually implemented the full-scale voucher system.